Prior to its $1.65 billion acquisition last month by Google, video-sharing giant YouTube cut licensing deals with three of the four major record labels.

Coldplay: On Gotuit but not YouTube.

The fourth is still holding out.

EMI said yesterday that it still had concerns about YouTube's ability to combat illicit uploads of copyrighted music videos, and today the UK label giant said that it had signed a licensing deal with YouTube rival Gotuit. The licensing deal gives Gotuit users free access to music videos from EMI artists like Coldplay, Robbie Williams, Gorillaz, and Lily Allen in exchange for a share of Gotuit's advertising revenue.

"Gotuit offers viewers an exciting and high-quality way to enjoy our artists' videos," EMI North America CEO David Munns said in a statement. "They're a valuable new channel for fans to connect with our artists' music and creative vision."

Gotuit has one major difference with YouTube: Its videos cannot be embedded in third-party Web pages as YouTube's can.

The Gotuit deal casts a shadow over YouTube's ability to convince EMI to license its content to it. Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and Warner Music Group have all licensed their music-video catalogs to YouTube in exchange for a slice of the advertising revenue and the ability to police YouTube of copyrighted material.

In reporting the company's earnings yesterday, EMI recorded music chief Alain Levy said that "we still feel that there are some copyright issues," and its chairman, Eric Nicoli, added that just because the other three had signed up "doesn't make it right."